Major Partners and Grants

We negotiate private and public sector partnerships in tandem through our regional office in Zambia and the U.S. headquarters, as well as with each individual library Lubuto creates. Major partnerships finance the establishment of libraries and the operations of the Lubuto organization, primarily focusing on capacity building and information product development. Partnerships with local businesses also help to sustain the libraries.

Lubuto Library Partners, one of 56 winners out of more than 800 Expressions of Interest, has been awarded a DREAMS Innovation Challenge grant of nearly $800,000 to support the two-year project focused on keeping adolescent girls in secondary school. Girls and young women account for 71% of new HIV infections among adolescents in sub-Saharan Africa, with more than 1,000 new infections a day. In response to this, DREAMS was launched in 2014 to help girls develop into Determined, Resilient, Empowered, AIDS-free, Mentored, and Safe women.

DREAMS Innovation Challenge

We were awarded grants from USAID’s American Schools and Hospitals Abroad (ASHA) program in 2014 and 2015 to build the fourth and fifth Lubuto libraries: the Mthunzi Library in Lusaka West with co-financing from our generous donor Judie Feedham and the Choma Library in Zambia's Southern Province, respectively. ASHA's awards go to organizations that represent the excellence and leadership of American institutions, so we are quite honored by this tribute to the quality of our work. ASHA is unique in that it solely funds construction or renovation of buildings and purchase of commodities. Since construction of Lubuto libraries is central to our mission, this is an excellent new funding source for Lubuto.

American Schools and Hospitals Abroad

After receiving an initial grant from the Open Society Initiative of Southern Africa (OSISA) in 2012 to evaluate the impact of our library model, we were awarded a new grant in 2013, jointly funded by OSISA and UK-based charity Comic Relief, for a project entitled "Improving access to quality education in Zambia through the Lubuto Library Model." Over three years, this support will enable us to build on our existing programs and promote our innovative model to stakeholders in Zambia and around the world. Under this project, we were also able to establish the first rural Lubuto library, the Mumuni Library in Zambia's Southern Province

OSISA and Comic Relief

We were one of 32 organizations chosen worldwide—out of more than 450 applications—to receive an All Children Reading (ACR) Grand Challenge for Development grant in 2012. The ACR Partnership–USAID, World Vision and AusAID–sought solutions to improve reading skills for children in the early grades to reach their goal of getting 100 million children reading by 2015. In serving Zambia’s marginalized young people, Lubuto identified very low literacy levels among the population it serves. Experts had established that children need to learn to read first in their mother tongue. The ACR award provided the opportunity for Lubuto, with the support of World Vision, to create more than 100 computer-based reading lessons for each of seven local Zambian languages. The lessons follow the new national reading curriculum and thus extend learning beyond the classroom, to computers and mobile devices used anywhere.

All Children reading

Dow Jones and Company and its employees very generously provided Lubuto with a corporate gift to cover construction costs of Ngwerere Library in 2010. Dow Jones employee book donations and a foundation grant together funded the collection and staff training for the new library as well. In a congratulatory letter to the children served by Ngwerere Library, Dow Jones' CEO stated that he wanted the library to "be a resource for your curiosity and your dreams. We want the words we now share to be a starting point on a journey of knowledge and learning that carries you forward in your lives."